Final Meals
(2006-20, Community-based performance, and video installation) Final Meals is a community-based performance/video installation. Each final meal as published by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice since 1982 is prepared, consumed, and filmed. Lucky Pierre and volunteers from the community cook recreations of the final meals requested by Texas death row inmates. A volunteer is then videotaped eating the meal. The recorded video is a single 22-mintue overhead black and white shot. The food is the focus of the video, what is prepared, what is consumed—a final gesture towards bodily maintenance and comfort.
After a filming, Lucky Pierre and project volunteers join together to prepare a communal meal and screen the archived videos. The accumulated images of fellow citizens consuming final meals is starkly strong and quietly contemplative as a meditation on the physical body, our collective social body, and the mechanisms of state power and responsibility. As the participants sit down for their communal meal, the projects is contextualized by a performative presentation. After the meal, there is time for focused conversation and the following question is posed - How do we move from a punitive culture to a restorative culture?
310 final meals have been published online by the State of Texas (in 2003 the State stopped publicly listing final meal requests). Over the past 16 years Lucky Pierre has now re-created 217 meals. When completed, the project will include over 200 hours of footage.
Cooked, filmed and screened at: Testsite, Austin; Soo Contemporary, Minneapolis; Grand Arts, Kansas City; Tufts University, Boston; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Hull House, Chicago; Kunsthaus, Graz; Ludlow 38, New York; Entretempo Gallery, Berlin; Detroit Contemporary, Detroit; Luminary, St. Louis; C3 & Open Engagement, Portland, OR; Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt, Germany; Uri-Eichen, Chicago; CUE Art Foundation, New York; Gallery 400, Chicago
Created, cooked, filmed, edited and organized by: Tyler B. Myers, Mary Zerkel, Jeff Kowalkowski, Bill Talsma, Michael Thomas, Kerry Hayes, Holly Abney, Kevin Kaempf, Matthew Nicholas, Travis Hale, Heather Lindahl
